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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24515509">Arachnophobia</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathishauntedbyhumans/pseuds/deathishauntedbyhumans'>deathishauntedbyhumans</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Aperture Labs - Modern Day AU [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Portal (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aperture Labs, Arachnophobia, Friendship/Love, M/M, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Slice of Life, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:47:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,328</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24515509</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathishauntedbyhumans/pseuds/deathishauntedbyhumans</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re telling me,” Craig begins, pulling his phone away from his ear and ending the call in one fluid motion. “—that you’re afraid to come out of the bathroom because of a <i>spider</i>?” He can’t help the incredulity in his tone or the laughter that’s threatening just below the surface of the question, because… Well, it’s <i>Rick</i>.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Adventure Core/Fact Core</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Aperture Labs - Modern Day AU [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1771699</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Arachnophobia</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Borrowing from the Geekenders musical a little ig bc they're humans that work at Aperture Science Labs,,, But also it's modern bc fuck canon I'm the king now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fact: Aperture Science’s rear science wing is particularly beautiful at night. </p><p>Not that it isn’t beautiful the rest of the time, in a disorganised, chaotic sort of way. Science in <em> itself </em> has always been beautiful to Craig; it’s why he’d worked so hard to find a place at Aperture Labs in the first place. Where there are people around and lights on and the general hustle-and-bustle of <em> science </em>around, Craig has always felt most at home. </p><p>But after hours, when the lights are on their supposedly-environmentally-safe low-power mode and there isn’t any clanging or banging coming from behind door number three, there is a very particular brand of beautiful that can be rivalled by little else. </p><p>He’s the last one in the wing, save for the skeleton night crew that Mr. Johnson keeps assuring is not made of literal skeletons. (Nobody’s ever seen them to pass judgement for themselves… or if they have, then they aren’t talking about it.) He’s pretty sure that Kevin packed up hours ago after he’d started yawning into his scale-accurate model of the solar system, which had left Wheatley and his team in one lab and Rick and himself in another. Rick had started whining about his stomach hurting —<em>probably </em>from the frankly ridiculous amount of pizza he had shovelled into his mouth for dinner— about an hour ago and, given the fact that he hadn’t returned, it was more than likely that he’d simply given up and gone home for the evening. </p><p>Craig pokes his head into Laboratory Four to ensure that Wheatley and his team are truly gone —and they are, unless they’ve been shrunk again, in which case Craig is <em> not </em>about to be the unlucky bastard to step on one of them this time— and then hangs up his lab coat for the night. He and Rick had gotten a good amount of work done on their joint project earlier, despite Rick’s complaining towards the end of the night. It’s been a satisfying day. </p><p>Working with Rick is… strange. Getting <em> along </em> with Rick is even stranger, and seems to be all the more rare for it. When they’d both started out, they’d become rivals almost immediately. Rick’s laid-back attitude had clashed horribly with Craig’s own sticktoitiveness, and their first impression —of Rick, with his hands covered in dirt and looking like he hadn’t shaved in a week, tripping and falling into Craig’s workstation— hadn’t exactly left either of them feeling comfortable working with (or <em> near) </em>one another. </p><p>But they’d been assigned to the Genetic Lifeforms and Operating Systems project at the same time, which meant that —for better or for worse— they’d been forced to make nice with one another. </p><p>...okay, so maybe <em> make nice </em>is too strong a misnomer for what they’d done, at least in the beginning. </p><p>Rick picked on him. <em> Constantly. </em> It was like having one of his high school bullies breathing down the back of his neck every day, except that this particular bully was also just about as smart as he was. So Craig had snipped at him, turned up his nose and tried to undermine him at his own game, and it turned out… Rick was <em> fun, </em> once they’d established an even playing field. He was a good guy, all things considered. He <em> was </em>intelligent, and charming (sometimes) and loud (most of the time), but it turned out that his ingenuitive, easygoing way of performing experiments perfectly tempered Craig’s own by-the-book, logical approaches. They were a good match. </p><p>They’d be a good match in other aspects of their lives, too, but Craig was very firmly ignoring <em> that </em> thought every time it crossed his mind. A work relationship was a <em> work </em>relationship, and even if they’d crossed into a tentative friendship, there was never any chance of anything happening any further between them. </p><p>Rick was… unfortunately, <em> exceedingly </em>straight. And he wasn’t quiet about it, either, much to the detriment of every single person who had ever so much as breathed in his general direction.</p><p>Craig sighs as he steps out of the building and into the brisk night air. Any lamenting he does about the fact that Rick will never get his head out of his ass long enough to consider that the fairer sex might not really <em> be </em>the fairer sex will be done in the comfort of his own home, as soon as he breaks his own rules and lets himself think about his feelings for him where nobody else can see him. </p><p>About halfway to his car, Craig’s phone goes off, buzzing in his pocket like some kind of angry beehive. He barely glances at the caller ID --<em>Adventure Capitalist (Rick)-- </em>before swiping the call in and holding the phone up to his ear. </p><p>“Hello?” </p><p>“Hey! Craig, uh-- Hey!” </p><p>Craig frowns and slows without thinking about it. There’s a strain to Rick’s voice that he can’t quite place. He sounds… stressed, or sick. Maybe it hadn’t been the pizza causing him grief, before, after all? </p><p>“Hello, Rick,” Craig replies, and then he waits. </p><p>On the other end of the line, Rick clears his throat. “I, uh-- Have you left, yet? Left work, I mean?” </p><p>“No…” Craig isn’t walking anymore; he’s standing in the middle of a near-empty parking lot with the floodlights above him illuminating both his car and Rick’s, side-by-side by some weird act of fate, at the other end. “Have you?” It’s a distracted question, because he <em> knows </em>the answer already. There’s no point in a verbal confirmation. </p><p>“Uh, no, I— Can you, uh, come to the bathroom, man?”</p><p>“<em>What</em>?”</p><p>Rick clears his throat again. “Can you come to the bathroom?” he asks, sounding more impatient than the first time. He gets the sentence out without stammering, at the very least. </p><p>Craig is already headed back to the building. He swipes his key card without any thought behind the action, more focused on the conversation than anything else. </p><p>“Are you ill?” he asks. </p><p>“What?” This time, it’s Rick asking. He clears his throat a <em> third time </em> —not that anyone is counting or anything— and then chuckles awkwardly. “Oh, the— nah, nah, I’m fine.” He sounds anything <em> but </em>fine, but Craig is too concerned to call him out on it. “I mean, relatively speaking. I’m not sick, don’t worry.”</p><p>Craig makes a beeline for the bathroom closest to their lab. “You aren’t making any sense,” he reprimands, though the effect is somewhat lessened by the worry he <em> knows </em>is bleeding into his voice. </p><p>The sound of air being blown through pursed lips directly into Rick’s microphone makes Craig wince. “Yeah, okay. Uh… This is gonna sound… pretty dumb.”</p><p>Craig’s got one hand on the handle of the bathroom door. “Right, because I’ve never heard you say anything dumb before.”</p><p>Rick doesn’t offer so much as a chuckle, which deepens the frown on Craig’s face. Nervously, he sticks his ear —the one not occupied with his phone— against the bathroom door, but there isn’t any sound coming from inside of it. </p><p>“There was a spider.” </p><p>There’s a quiet echo of Rick’s voice from inside of the bathroom when he speaks, which is the only reason that Craig is sure that he’s just heard him correctly. Still, he feels a little like he needs to clean out his ears, because-- </p><p>“A <em> spider?”  </em></p><p>Rick shuffles on the other end of the line. “Look, I know what it sounds like, a’right? Can you just—“</p><p>Craig interrupts him by pushing the bathroom door open slowly, and Rick cuts off in the middle of his sentence. </p><p>“You’re telling me,” Craig begins, pulling his phone away from his ear and ending the call in one fluid motion. “—that you’re afraid to come out of the bathroom because of a <em> spider</em>?” He can’t help the incredulity in his tone or the laughter that’s threatening just below the surface of the question, because… Well, it’s <em> Rick.  </em></p><p>There has never been a dull moment with Rick around. He’s always going on and on about the adventures that he has outside of work: bears he’s faced down, mountains he’s climbed, people he’s fought. Most of it sounds too fabricated to be true —a fact that Craig is <em> constantly </em>interjecting into his stories, despite Rick’s general distaste for being interrupted— but throughout every tale, there’s always a thirst for exploration. It’s a desperate need to be the centre of attention, yes, but it’s also a desperation to think about the adventures he’s been on. </p><p>At least, that’s the way he’s always seen them. He’s never actually spoken to Rick on the matter past jabbing into the falsified truths he spews, because Rick is never very inclined to bare his soul like that. </p><p>Craig can’t blame him, really. It’s not like <em> he </em>has ever offered to bare his own soul in response. </p><p>Rick is sitting on top of the counter beside the sink with a strangely <em> vulnerable </em>look on his face, one that washes away with a smile that’s more fake than any other expression Craig has ever caught him with. </p><p>“What can I say?” he says flippantly, like he’s hoping that Craig won’t pursue the subject. “For all I know, they might have been super-intelligent mutant spiders or some shit. Remember the mantis men?” </p><p>Unfortunately, the thought of the mantis men is enough to wipe any smug smirk he might have been wearing off of his face. Craig <em>does</em> remember the mantis men. He remembers them a little too well, considering that they’d burst into their lab while Rick had been out for lunch and had taken Craig captive. He and several other scientists had been shepherded into a utility closet, and it hadn’t been until after the week’s respective test subjects had successfully taken the mantis army down that they had been able to escape. </p><p>He shudders and grimaces. “Fair enough.” When Rick makes no move to leave his perch, though, Craig’s brows raise slowly up onto his forehead. “You can come down, now, Rick.” </p><p>“Oh! Right!” It must be the terrible bathroom lighting falling onto Rick’s face that makes him look as though he’s blushing. There is no way a flush appears on his cheeks, despite the fact that it seems that way. He hops down gingerly from the counter, glancing nervously around like he’s afraid of his surroundings. “Right, I, uh-- sorry about that, man. I-- heh, guess we should go?” </p><p>Craig can’t get a word in edgewise before Rick takes him bodily by the shoulders, spins him around, and steers him right back out the door. </p><p>They’re about halfway down the hallway before Rick clears his throat --out of embarrassment, perhaps?-- and pointedly drops his hands from Craig’s shoulders, stopping the power-walk he’d been forcing Craig to keep up with or risk getting the heels of his shoes stepped on. </p><p>“I--” </p><p>“Fact:--” Craig interrupts, whirling around to face Rick again. They’re startlingly close, closer than they usually come even in the shared quarters of their lab. “--nearly ten percent of the human population is affected by moderate to severe arachnophobia.” It’s just a hunch, but it’s an educated guess that Craig is almost certain he has figured correctly. If the way Rick’s shoulders tense in the dim, night lighting of the building is any indication, his hunch <em> is </em>correct. Craig forces himself to relax, to try and consciously soften his expression so as not to put Rick on the defensive. </p><p>It’s not often that Craig has any kind of high ground between them. Rick is usually the one with an advantage in their little battles of wit, when they don’t have equal footing. If he were meaner, Craig thinks to himself wryly, he would use Rick’s fear to his own benefit. It would be so easy to say the wrong thing, to make fun of him for something that is out of his control. </p><p>But it isn’t fair. Rick is a lot of things, but he’s never intentionally cruel, and Craig doesn’t want to be the first to venture into a territory like that. So he smiles, softly, up at Rick’s closed-off expression. “I am not going to judge you for something that you likely have little to no control over,” he says earnestly. “What good would that do either of us?” </p><p>Rick searches his gaze, squinting slightly, looking for all the world like a deer ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. So Craig holds his gaze, lets him look, lets him search for whatever proof he needs that the truth is being told. </p><p>And then slowly, Rick smiles, and it’s such an unguarded look that Craig almost feels like he needs to catch his breath at the sight of it. </p><p>“Thanks,” he says, and there’s so much <em> feeling </em>in such a simple word. “You headin’ out?” </p><p>Craig politely does <em> not </em>mention that he’d already been in the parking lot when Rick had called. “Yes. You may walk with me, if you’d like the company.” </p><p>Rick slings a companionable arm over his shoulder, and for once, Craig doesn’t feel the desperate desire to slide away like a rabbit caught in a trap. Something… Something feels like it’s shifted, and it doesn’t feel like a bad thing at all. (Maybe, just <em>maybe</em>, Rick isn't as "exceedingly straight" as Craig has always believed. It feels like something too good to be true, but <em>maybe</em>...) “I’d love that,” he says, and Craig can hear the grin in his voice when he adds, “Have I ever told ya about the time I fought that grizzly bear off the side of the highway?” </p><p>Craig groans good-naturedly, but he’s hiding a grin of his own. “You tell me every day,” he complains. Rick squeezes his shoulder and laughs, loud and guffawing. </p><p>“Well, lemme tell you again, just to be sure. It was a dark and stormy night, and there I was, trapped on the side of the road with my car dead, and a bear in the woods slo-o-o-wly closing in…”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>anyways uhhhh human!Fact is on the autism spectrum thank you for coming to my ted talk</p><p>Kudos/comments are love! Come scream at me on tumblr @deathishauntedbyhumans</p></blockquote></div></div>
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